“The wise man’s eyes are in his head.”
What does that mean? Are not everybody’s eyes in their head? No, they may be on the face, on each side of the nose, but that is a different thing from being in the head.
One afternoon, your father sends you to the toolbox for the hammer. But, though you rummage through all the tools, you cannot find the hammer. So you come back and say “I can’t see it, it isn’t there!”
“That’s just like you,” says your father, “you can never find things.”
Then he goes for it, and, catching hold of the toolbox impatiently, pushes it against the wall. “Why, what is this behind the box?” says he, pulling out the hammer, “why don’t you use your head?”
If you had had your eyes in your head, you would have seen that the box did not go flat against the wall, and would have felt behind it.
Two boys took the same walk, one day, across the fields. When they got home, they were asked what they had seen.
One of them said that he had been past the Hill farm, and through the woods to the river, but there was nothing to see, nothing that he hadn’t seen a hundred times before.
The other had been having “a ripping time”; at the Hill farm there was a crabapple with mistletoe growing on it, and, coming through the woods, he had seen a pecker running up and down the trees and rapping after his food; but better still, he had startled a water rat, and watched him swimming right across the river, and just when he was lying down by the weir and thinking that he should see nothing else, there came a kingfisher, and it was the biggest fun in the world to see how he carried on.
If you have your eyes in the place where you do your thinking, it is really wonderful what you can see. What, for instance, are those wasps doing by the side of the muddy pool? They are coming in pairs, and flying away in pairs. One of them picks up a little pellet of mud, and the other fills his mouth with water. When they reach their nest, the one sets down his little bit of mud, and the other throws over it his tiny drop of water, and then they puddle it and fly away for more.
Or why is that lapwing circling round your head, and making those strange cries? Why does it shoot down close to you, and then dart away in front as if it wanted you to follow? You have come too near the nest, and the wise bird is doing everything it can think of to attract your attention and draw you away.
John Ruskin was a great lover of pictures. And he found them everywhere, in the galleries, and in the streets, on the clouds, and on the rocks. He has helped us as much as any man to see the beauty of the world. When he was a boy, he used to be delighted with the column of water that rose from the main when the turn-cock was watering the sewers. He saw the same beauty in that little fountain that he afterwards beheld in the leaping waterfalls of Italy and Switzerland.
One day, when he was grown up, he was out walking with a friend, near the time of sunset, in wintertime; as they were going past a tree, he stooped down, and put the branches between himself and the sun, and gently drew his friend down to him so that he could see the wonderful network of the tree against the and gold of the setting sun. “Look there,” said he, “isn’t that beautiful?”
It would never occur to most men to find any beauty in that tree, just because most boys would only look at a fountain in the streets as making a stream to jump over or to paddle in.
There was once a very poor woman living in an out-of-the-way spot in Australia. A traveler came to the door one day, who asked her a few questions as to how she made a living. She told him that since her husband died she had stayed on in the same house doing a little washing, but found it very hard to make enough money to keep herself. The stranger was looking round at the things in the hut while the woman was talking. The clothes which she was washing were contained in a big wooden tub, which stood on a great slab of quartz. Said the stranger at last, “Why, my good woman, your washing-tub is standing on enough gold to make you rich for the rest of your life.” And it was true.
When God made the eye, He made a most wonderful thing, and He intended us to use it. We need never be dull, and never poor if we are wise enough to have our eyes “in the head.”
“The world is so full of a number of things that we all ought to be as happy as kings.”
If we use our eyes properly, we shall grow up to be useful, and when others want to know things, they will learn to ask us. The man who found out more about the stars than anyone else in his day was Galileo. He was always looking at things with his eyes in his head. He went one day into a cathedral at Pisa, and saw a lamp swinging. That suggested to him the pendulum. And that was the first idea towards making a clock.
Looking at things doesn’t cost much, and it doesn’t hurt anyone. What you see, no one can take away from you. You’ll always be the poorer for what you miss seeing, but the things you see will help to make you rich.